Talking to Growl

Growl relies on other applications to tell it of what needs to be shown to the users. You, the application developer, can use this page to figure out how best to talk to Growl.

In the past there were many different ways you could talk to Growl as a 3rd party developer. With the 1.3 release we have
greatly simplified that list down to two primary APIs, AppleScript and Growl Network Transport Protocol(GNTP). The available
AppleScript API is discussed in greater detail in our AppleScript Developer Guide.

The GNTP API, which the Cocoa Growl.framework
leverages, is the recommended communication interface going forward. The 1.3 release completely drops all legacy networking support
in favor of an all GNTP stack. For further information on implementing Growl in your Cocoa application you'll want to read the
Cocoa Application Developer Guide.

Growl Network Transport Protocol (GNTP)

GNTP was designed as a joint effort between Growl, Growl for Windows and the Adobe AIR team as a replacement for the antequated
and inadequate GrowlTalk UDP protocol. The result of that effort brings us a more flexible network stack that can be leveraged by any
number of scripting and programming languages. It also opens up the possibility of forwarding notifications over IPv6 and Back to my Mac.

3rd party libraries:

Java

Perl

PHP

Python

Ruby

Legacy APIs

In the past we included a Bindings directory in the Growl SDK which provided a range of langauge support. As of the 1.3 release we are no
longer going to be directly maintaining these language bindings and as a result you'll see that they're no longer included. It is recommended
you transition to one of the GNTP based libraries. In the case of RealBasic there is a 3rd party library that currently makes use of an older
version of the Growl framework, here.